Bruce Kent: Let us support the Agenda of Peace of Pope Francis

Bruce Kent

Source: NJPN Blog

This, thanks to COVID and dreary winter weather, could be a gloomy time for many of us. But for many of us also, and not just Catholics, there is one great shaft of warm sunshine and clear common sense. It comes from Pope Francis, now an 84-year-old. Endlessly active, he clearly does not know what taking time off might mean.

He has recently returned from almost a week in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. On the island of Lesbos he met thousands of refugees fleeing from turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, trapped in a camp and unable to move on with their lives. He gave them hope and encouragement and had so much to say to us about their plight.

"The remote causes" - he mentioned exploitation of the poor, well-financed wars and the arms trade - "should be attacked, not the poor people who pay the consequences and are even used for political propaganda".

He went on to criticise European leaders who want to build a wall to keep immigrants out. So much for the Polish Prime Minister. We in Britain don't need to build a wall. The Channel is wall enough.

Pope Francis has spoken no less forcibly about nuclear weapons. His representative at the UN General Assembly in September 2018, Archbishop Gallagher, made their rejection clear. "The world is not safer with nuclear weapons; it is more dangerous," he said. This just underlines Pope Francis's own words at a meeting in Rome in 2017.

He talked then about "the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices". He said, "if we take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned; for they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties to the conflict but the entire human race."

Please do not think that I am Pope fixated. But I recognise good sense when I see it. Much of it comes also from other Churches, faiths, and secular social change movements.

By way of balance let me give you a comment from Dr Al-Tikriti, President of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB): "War has today become an industry which benefits the rich and powerful while consuming the impoverished, deprived and marginalised," he said; "it is also incredible that no one mentions the immeasurable devastation that wars and military conflicts inflict on the planet."

Strange, but no accident, that at COP26, the recent UN meeting on Climate Change held in Glasgow, the massive contribution to CO2 output by the world's military hardly got a mention despite all the efforts of peace activists outside the official meeting.

Pope Francis serves the whole world by making sense of the connections between issues that might seem separate: refugees, poverty, war, the arms trade, climate change, the Covid crisis, our indifference to each other and the rest of creation. Perhaps we could join forces behind the Holy Father's 'agenda for peace'? If this inspires you but you're not too sure where to start, put Sunday 16 January 2022 in your diary. That's 'Peace Sunday', and he has given us a rich topic to explore: 'Education, work and dialogue between generations: tools for building lasting peace'. That's something we could all contribute to in our families, parishes, schools, justice and peace groups, and other networks. Let's make connections across generations and get going!

Find ideas and resources here: https://paxchristi.org.uk/peace-sunday-2022/